About Distill

Distill turns a topic into a weekly digest, synthesized across many media — YouTube channels, podcasts, newsletters and expert accounts on X. Each issue contains one summary per item plus a themed overview of the week. Every topic on this site runs on the same engine; only the source list, the themes and the prompts differ.

How an issue is built

1. 1 · Collect. Every curated source is queried for items published inside the week's window. Nothing is discovered, recommended or pulled in from outside the list.
2. 2 · Fetch the substance. Videos and podcasts are transcribed, articles are fetched as text, X accounts are searched for that account's own posts. The summary is written from that material — not from a headline.
3. 3 · Summarize per item. Each item is condensed separately and strictly from its own content. Where a claim is contested or attributed, the attribution stays in the summary.
4. 4 · Synthesize the week. The per-item summaries — and only those — are condensed into a cover story and a fixed set of themed sections. Anything too thin for a section is bundled rather than dropped.

The rules it follows

• Deterministic, not autonomous. The pipeline is ordinary code: the same input takes the same path. The language model is used only to transform text — to summarize, translate or condense. It never decides what to read, in which order, or what to publish.
• Bound to the source. A summary may only contain what its item actually says. Nothing is completed from general knowledge, however plausible. Every item links back to the original.
• Whole weeks, no overlap. An issue covers Sunday 00:00 through Saturday 23:59 UTC. Consecutive issues tile exactly — nothing is counted twice and nothing falls between two issues, regardless of when a run actually happens.
• Silence is reported. A source that published nothing is listed as such instead of being hidden. What was not covered is part of the record.
• Curated by hand. Sources are chosen deliberately and published in full on each topic's sources page. There is no engagement signal and no algorithmic ranking anywhere in the pipeline.

What it is not

Not a news wire — issues are weekly and deliberately late rather than fast. Not a ranking — prominence in an issue reflects how much the sources said, not what an algorithm thinks matters. Not a substitute for reading the primary source: every summary is a pointer, and the link next to it is the actual claim.